


Malfunctions

by michaelLemieux



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Gen, M/M, haha ow
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-23
Updated: 2017-03-20
Packaged: 2018-07-16 19:37:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 5,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7281958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/michaelLemieux/pseuds/michaelLemieux
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Banner patches up the Winter Soldier after a mission. However, with the Asset, nothing is ever that simple.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

It panicked. The panic was quiet, internal, but when it’s mouth opened and its eyes closed to accept the usual mouth guard he assumed was coming, the room stopped moving. That’s when its heart rate shot up and it started to count exits and threats and the collateral damage of escaping from this room which held three Avengers. 

“Wait, Buck? What are you doing?” 

The Asset’s eyes flew open to lock on Rogers who's concerned face was twisted up, his hands already reaching out for his Bucky. Its jaw snaps shut in a grimace, hating the look of pity and compassion on Rogers’ face. The plastic chair arm was nothing compared to the reinforced steel of the proper machine, and it broke with several loud snaps under the pressure of the Asset’s metal fingers. 

The mission wasn’t clear. It was supposed to be Bucky. James Buchanan Barnes, Sergeant of the United States Army, sniper of the Howling Commandos during World War II. Best friend to Captain America, whose life was tragically lost during the war. Lost. 

Rogers still thought he was found. 

“Out.” 

Rogers’ eyes flicker to Bruce for a split second before deciding to ignore that comment and return to his Bucky, even taking a step towards him. 

“Out, now!” 

This time Banner puts himself between the Asset and the rest of the room, his broad palms extended out as a buffer and a warning. 

“Both of you, I want you out. Now.” 

Natasha takes Steve’s arm and perp-walks him out of the examination room. As the doors close, she’s already telling him that after the mission he needs sleep, or should wind down somewhere else since he’s obviously not injured. He passed the check-up with no flags raised. 

The Asset is silent. No breathing, no movement save for its eyes tracking the last person in the room. It doesn’t know this one. It didn’t know the last one, either. But there was a different feeling behind how its instincts saw this one. He was… newer than the other one. 

“Count eight beats as you breathe in and as you breathe out until your heart rate lowers.” 

It breathes. Follows orders. Brown eyes are looking into its face for the first few breaths and then down and away as he checks other vital signs, searches for the source of the blood slowly soaking his shirt. 

“I’m malfunctioning.” 

Bruce’s head snaps up at that. Bucky actually spoke first. He watches the look in its eyes as he thinks about how to respond. The pupils are larger than they should be, and while it was still breathing the way he’d specified, the heart rate was still erratic. 

“Malfunctioning?” he asks, still watching the Asset’s reactions. 

“Involuntary muscle contractions, erratic heart rate and breathing, difficulty speaking.” 

“Difficulty speaking?” 

“A lump in my throat.” 

Bruce’s eyes soften from immediate discernment of an unseen malady to calm understanding. 

“A panic attack.” 

“I am not panicked.” 

“Then your body is. Something has triggered an attack such as this whether you are cognitively aware of the reason or not. Tell me what you were thinking about when the difficulty speaking began.” 

“There’s a man. He was with me in the vault. I… knew him.” 

Bruce nods, cutting away the shirt from the Asset’s chest revealing a shallow stabwound between the second and third false rib. 

“Did you like him?”

“...yes. He was pleasant. More so than the others.” 

He nods. He cleans the wound, noticing that not only was the Asset not reacting to the pain, but it didn’t realize was its body was telling him about his feelings. It was incredibly sad. Sad, but at the same time insanely endearing in a way that Bruce was unprepared to handle. 

He looked up into the Asset’s face again, two fingers gently placed at its pulse, and asked, “Where is he now?” 

“Presumed dead.” 

Bruce watched as tears began to fall from the Asset’s eyes. It lets them fall, snot soon following as he struggles to continue counting through his breaths despite the sobs threatening to overtake him. 

“Try to think about Steve,” Bruce says instead. “I need you to remain still while I sew you up.” 

Bruce waits patiently for the Asset to regain control over his spasming muscles and breathe evenly, still counting in eights. He works quickly as he can to sew up the stab wound, clean and precise as he always is. 

“It’s going to be a struggle.” 

The Asset’s eyes snap up from some spot on the ground to Bruce’s face. 

“It might be confusing a lot of the time, but… it’s not going to kill you. Though it might feel that way sometimes, emotions, they… grief won’t kill you unless you let it. I don’t think that’s a concern with you.” 

Banner looks up into Bucky’s face and sighs. 

“None of this makes sense to you, does it?” 

The Asset shakes its head. 

Banner nods. He backs away and motions for Bucky to stand. 

“Think about that person. Let thoughts of him fill you up until you experience those… malfunctions, again. Then, I want you to embrace me. Allow yourself to m-malfunction until you tire yourself out.” 

Its eyes narrow at the oddity of the orders, but acquiesces. Its chest tightens, throat closing, as its eyes blur and tear. Then, its arms wrap themselves around the smaller doctor, mindful of the metal arm that could easily crush him.

* * *

 

It takes over three hours for the Asset to tire, and calm. Even when stabbed and stressed, it was still in pique condition and would not relinquish control of its body to fatigue. In that time, Bruce’s legs began to protest standing for so long, and he moved them through a glass door to a sort of waiting room where a couch sat. 

At first they merely sat together as the Asset wept and Bruce quietly cleaned his face between bouts of frustrated, Russian counting. Then, one of Bruce’s legs ended up over the Asset’s lap in an attempt to remain close to him, and as the Asset slowly gave over to fatigue, they ended up lying together on the couch. The Asset’s legs remained hanging off the couch, but both of Bruce’s were up on it’s faded red cushions, his body resting on top of the Asset’s. 

A few things were certain. His shirt was ruined for the moment by snot and tears, and while he would very much like to change it, the breast was clutched tightly in the sleeping Asset’s metal hand. This very hand, was not going to budge a millimetre until its host woke up again. In light of these facts, Bruce resigned himself to laying atop Steve Rogers’ favourite person. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve does not take well to the composition of Bucky and Banner when he comes upon them.

Being woken up by a distressed Captain America is unpleasant for most parties involved. Particularly the Asset. 

“Banner, what the hell is this?” the Captain barks.

The Asset had already awoken when Rogers walked into the room, but it hadn’t anticipated yelling, and therefore shifted from beneath Dr. Banner to in front of him in the blink of an eye. Its face was dark as it was on the day it first saw Rogers in person, and that scared Steve even more than finding Bruce and Bucky cuddling on a couch. 

“What the fuck is going on?” Steve demands again, hands curling into shaky fists. 

By this point, the noise and jolt of movement woke Dr. Banner. The Asset had put itself between him and Captain Rogers, still sitting on the couch, blocking Banner from sitting up properly. He manages something in a few seconds however and squirms his way into sitting next to the Asset. 

“Captain, please calm down,” he begins. 

“Calm down? I’ll calm down when you’ve explained yourself!” 

The tone Steve is using at the moment triggers something in the Asset. It was the same tone that Pierce used when it returned without killing Captain America. The bastardization of its one almost choice set off some sort of chain reaction in its brain. It became flying through different scenarios that it was prepared for, and different modes of appeasement, but every time it thought it knew what Captain America wanted from it, it was met with ‘What? No, Buck, you don’t--” and other fucking mannerisms of care and kindness and pity. Now it was true anger coming from Captain America, and that was something the Asset was used to seeing from a range of people. The angry dead that fell to its knife, the angry loved ones left behind, Pierce was he didn’t get his way, Rollins when the Asset was being favored by Rumlow, and… Rumlow, who was scared, who lashed out and struck it. 

Banner is saying something behind its back, but all the Asset can think is to expose its neck to Rogers as a peace offering. It drops down to the floor on its knees, hands slack at its side, and the long mangy hair it still doesn’t maintain falling forward to cover the swollen eyes and grit teeth. 

The room goes quiet around the pounding in the Asset’s ears. It can’t make out what it is that Rogers is saying again, but it’s probably some last remark before ‘Bucky’ is properly dealt with. The Asset knows it doesn’t play that role right. It doesn’t speak the same way, think the same way, move, act, eat, drink, anything the way his ‘Bucky’ did. The Asset doesn’t know this Bucky person it’s supposed to be, and every time a memory comes back to him it’s blurred and faded. There’s no colour or emotion left in it, and it’s trying, it’s trying so fucking hard to make Steve happy, to be that soldier Steve wants it to be, because everyone else is fucking dead, and the last one person left to appease is Captain America himself. The only one left who will take control of the Asset and give it a mission. The mission is to be Bucky. 

But it can’t.

 

“--Steve, it was a panic attack, I was helping him,” Banner is explaining calmly over the green itching at his gills and the Other Guy wanting to scream at Steve until he leaves Bucky alone for him to care for. 

“I don’t know what the hell a ‘panic attack’ is, but I’m sure that Bucky’s never had one in his life before! Why did I find you two--cu---fon--together on the couch?” 

“Because my legs hurt, so we sat down and fell asleep. It happens, Steve, you need to calm down. He needs support right now, not you yelling at us.” 

“I’m not yelling!” 

Banner takes a breath and rubs his forehead. 

“I obviously need to have a longer talk with you on the subject of mental health, since you seem to be illiterate to the basics of modern psychology, and since you are in a heightened state of agitation, I am going to take Bucky back to his room where you are not causing him distress.” 

Steve opens his mouth to protest, and Banner allows the Other Guy to grumble a bit at the Captain. Rogers glowers at Bruce while the shorter of them stands off against him, protecting Bucky. With an angry huff, Steve stomps out of the room, seeing that not only did Banner have control over himself, but was not going to back down. 

 

He was leaving. Its mission was leaving. 

The Asset stands up suddenly to Captain Rogers out of the room, but Banner spins to catch it. 

“No, Sgt. Barnes. You’re still under my care and I will have to insist that you follow my instructions.” 

The Asset turns its head down to look at Bruce and the concerned frown is back on its face. It doesn’t understand what’s going on at the moment, and it would rather be back in the vault where it knew what was expected of it and how it was to be treated. Not in this confusing world that was bigger than the mission, and had so many damned people tugging it in so many directions. All it knew right now was that Steve wanted it to be Bucky, and while it remembered flashes of a scrawny child, they were mere scraps compared to this whole person that Steve wanted it to be. 

“I don’t understand,” the Asset says softly, frankly. 

Bruce nods. 

“First, we’re going to head back to your room. I’ll explain on the way.” 


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The walk to the Asset's room.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And so the saga continues. *eyebrow waggle*

Somehow the short walk from the examination rooms to the elevator at the back of the Avengers tower took almost an eternity. The Asset took it one step at a time, counting in eights to fill the tumultuous silence in its head. Flashes of memory slip through the mounting headache at its temples to plague it with thoughts of ‘I have to keep it up,’ and ‘shit, did he notice?’. Vestibules of the same damned mission. One assigned to the Asset before it was… it. 

“Bu--uhm, er…” Banner stammers next to him. 

The filler words filter through the Assets mind without catching on any protocols requiring its attention.  _ His  _ voice plays in the weapon’s mind again as it spots the elevator and unconsciously speeds its pace just slightly. ‘It would kill him. It would really kill him to find out. Shit, I have to keep this up, don’t I? He should’ve left me there. I should’ve just died.’ 

“Sergeant Barnes,” Bruce settles on finally, calling the elevator for them and turning his head to look at ‘Bucky’s’ face. “I read your file. Not on the uh, the Winter Soldier project, but… the one from 1943. You were kept as a prisoner of war with HYDRA. That file was one of the records Agent Romanoff released.” 

What little accessory movement the Asset had allowed itself while at the Tower ceased. That voice was back in its head, reciting dog tag numbers to cold walls. These memories seemed painfully clear compared to the others. The eight by eight room kept at near freezing. The aching silence only broken by poisoned water being shoved through a slot. The shadows that moved and spoke when you drank the water. The other voices telling you to submit, break, and dance on the nazi palm they offered to take you out with.   
“HYDRA was doing a lot of paranormal research, but it seems in the early days, I suppose mostly to get funding, they did research for Hitler on weapons. Metal and… well, human.” 

Bruce is looking at the Asset again. In an anxious tick, he’d looked away, but now those brown eyes were boring a hole into the Asset’s cheek. 

The elevator finally opens. 

They stand apart, both facing the wall, but Bruce’s attention is still focused solely on the Asset. 

“It seems like they were conducting research similar to Project ARTICHOKE. A… lesser attempt at the mind control the Soviets seemed to perfe--” 

The Asset is an inch from Bruce’s face. Dark brown hair hangs around them in a veil as it cranes to meet Banner’s eyes on level with its own. The metal hand has dented the wall of the elevator behind Bruce’s head. There’s intent to kill written all over the Asset’s face, and Bruce’s heart kicks into third gear looking at it, seeing more than just the shell of Bucky Barnes in that look. 

“Don’t,” it growls. 

To Bruce, it feels like the warning comes from both of them. 

The elevator stops, and Bruce pushes at the right elbow next to his head, waiting for the Asset to move its arm before exiting the lift. He waits patiently to be followed before continuing down the hall to the room that’s currently being called home to the Asset. 

“I’ll tell Captain Rogers to avoid the subject,” he says simply, holding open the door. “And I’ll ask you not to provoke me in turn for not provoking you. If you like, I’ll see you at dinner. Until then, I suggest you get some rest, and… well, take it easy.” 

The door is closed, and he leaves. 

 


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A letter.

After an hour of sitting in silence, a letter is slotted underneath the door of the Asset’s quarters. 

 

“ _ Sergeant Barnes.  _

 

_ While I understand the trigger that caused your outburst in the elevator, Tony does not. He is both impressed and upset that his elevator is ‘dinged’ and requests that you give him an apology.  _

_ I have not yet spoken to Captain Rogers regarding your mental health, as I anticipate that to be a rather lengthy and unpleasant endeavor, but rest assured that I will very soon. I cannot guarantee that he will understand or empathise with your situation, but I have high hopes that a thorough explanation will give him insight into the pressure he places on you. Perhaps it will ease the suffering of the both of you.  _

_ This, however, is not the reason I have chosen to mail you. Moving past various smaller factors, such as providing you with a ‘at home’ feeling by not using more technologically advanced means of communication, this letter is about what you are going to be going through.  _

_ From what I can tell of your mental state, you have been rendered a type of forced apathy. While the emotions you had prior to this state are not gone, they are simply being ignored by your conscious brain. This is not altogether uncommon among those suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, as many forms of mental regression are also common, but your case is (of course) unique. Perhaps this is not the best metaphor for me to use here, but explaining the situation without directly equating it to your own psyche may help you to better gain an understanding of what you are unwittingly going through:  _

_ I, myself, suffer from what perhaps is an exaggerated case of multiple personality disorder. Similar though in ways to the case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, or even bipolarism, I am as unique as you are. We do, however, share a common ‘enemy’. Mine is whom I call the ‘Other Guy’ and yours is your emotions. Now, I cannot control the Other Guy. He can greatly influence and affect  _ _ me,  _ _ but he cannot completely overtake me. In many cases, while I am constantly aware of his presence and weary of his effects, he can blindside me. Surprise me into temporarily losing control over myself and doing something I normally would not. In the end, I am always able to come to my senses and recover, but the damage and sudden impact of that event is often very disorienting and upsetting.  _

_ If we follow this analogy, the grief of losing your friend, the trauma of what you’ve been through over the last seventy years, those are your Other Guy. They may frighten you, cause you to do things you would not usually think to do, get you into trouble, or enrage you beyond words. You may not understand him, what he does to you, or what he makes you want to do, but the difficult lesson for the both of us is that the ‘Other Guy’ that we separate ourselves so vehemently from, is also a part of us. We can no more be apart from it than it can be from us, and we must find a way to peacefully coexist. There will always be conflict and strife, but without learning to accept and work with our respective Other Guys, we cannot be whole, nor healthy.  _

_ To bring this point back around to the current situation,  _ _ to be healthy _ _ , is what Captain Rogers truly wants for you. He may tell you he wants his Bucky, but what ‘Bucky’ really represents is a healthy version of you. To him, full health and happiness is the Bucky Barnes he was best friends with. It will take time for him to realize that that is an impossibility now. You are only you, and cannot return to that childhood friend. Captain Rogers must go through the mourning process for that friend just as much as you must for yours.  _

_ That, perhaps, is the topic for another letter.  _

_ I hope this letter proves to be helpful in someway to you.  _

 

_ With best wishes,  _

_ Dr. Bruce Banner ”             _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hands up who thinks Bruce might have blown it a bit in the end of that letter, eh?


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Avengers have supper.

It was a relatively small affair. Tony, Bruce, and Natasha sat on one side of the table, Steve and the Asset on the other. Tony kept shooting suspicious glances at the Asset, watching it for more damage to his building or property, to which Steve returns wrathful glares that Tony scoffs off. Natasha is eating calmly, sitting to Bruce’s left, but she’s on guard as she does so. The Asset watches all of this without taking a bite of food yet. It’s ham and potatoes with sides of asparagus or green beans. It has all this and a glass of milk set before it, but the Asset isn’t sure how to go about eating this. It was never afforded more than military rations or a fluids IV. There were no utensils necessary in any of that, but the Asset was at least smart enough to not dig in with its hands. 

Instead, it watches the other Avengers as they eat. Tony is haphazardly shoving food into his mouth from the side, one hand furiously typing at a screen while he works and watches Sgt. Barnes. Natasha looks bored as she stares into her food, eating it with care and attention. Bruce is almost dainty in his eating, cutting each piece properly and taking deliberate, slow bites of the individual foods, one at a time. Steve is less careful about his eating, but not to Tony’s extent. He eats efficiently, ham and potatoes at once, a full fork of beans. 

Rogers is the last to notice his Bucky isn’t eating, but he is the first to say something about it. 

“Buck? Why aren’t you eating?” he asks, leaning in like their speaking conspiratorially about something. 

Frantically the Asset roils through what it knows about James Buchanan Barnes and the tapes of him speaking and laughing and interacting with Captain America, seeking something that matches the tenor of his voice and could be appropriate for this scenario. There’s nothing perfect, so it pulls on one of those vague memories of lying to this same face and says, “I’m fine, Cap.” 

It watches the flinch that it sees in Steve’s face, and the room goes still. The Asset breaks eye contact and looks to his plate, picking up a fork in his left hand, stabbing a piece of ham with too much force, and both the plate and the fork snap. 

Tony’s head whips around. “The fuck you think you’re doing to my stuff? That was brand new!” he gripes loudly. 

The Asset’s head whips up from the plate to look at that angry face. The muscles move before it can think but before its knees hit the ground to offer submission, Steve’s hand is on its shoulder, a mean glare leveled at Tony. 

“Don’t yell at him, Tony. It was that damned arm, not him,” Steve defends. 

“First he breaks my wall, now he’s breaking my cutlery? And you’re defending him? Damn it, Steve, he’s not a child, he’s gotta take his own responsibility instead of you mother ducking him all the fucking time!” 

“Tony, watch your language,” Steve growls. “And I’m not mothering him, I’m helping him.” 

Bruce stands up quietly while Tony and Steve bicker about Barnes, and takes the offending asset by the arm and gently takes him away. He leaves Barnes at the elevator with strict instructions to do whatever he wants to. Bruce goes back to the dining room with promises to later find the asset and bring him some food to eat in peace. 

 

Natasha drags Steve away to one of the other rooms, and Bruce stays behind in the dining room with Tony. 

“I’ll help you clean up, alright?” he murmurs, picking up plates and encouraging Tony to follow suit. 

“This fucking kid, Bruce, I swear,” Tony starts. “He needs get his shit together. I don’t care what he does with it, it just needs to be together.” 

“Tony, he’s been through more than any of us know. I would have thought you’d feel for him.” 

“Feel for him? What does that mean?” Tony asks, stopping dead on one end of the kitchen island. 

Bruce calmly sets the dishes in the sink and turns to Tony. “This may be a low blow, but he was essentially held hostage and forced to work for people who were doing bad things. It was work or die. And then he sacrificed himself doing what was right.” 

Recognition settles in the moment Tony begins to open his mouth and say he doesn’t get it. The plates are suddenly too warm in his hands from cooling food, and he puts them on the counter, anxiously wringing his hands. 

“Oh. Yeah, alright, I get it.” 

Bruce steps up to Tony and almost brings a hand to pat his back. “For someone so smart, you’re a bit dense, aren’t you?” 

Tony mock glares at Bruce, but shakes his head and returns to the dining room to clean up the plate shards. 

 

After clearing the table and finishing everything else, Bruce makes a ham sandwich for Sgt. Barnes and sets out. When he’s in the elevator he asks JARVIS where the Asset is, and is brought to the gym floor. There’s a track running around the whole of the floor and inside the track were floor mats, bars, a beam, a boxing ring, and several different types of punching bags, and other equipment. 

Sgt. Barnes was finishing the last set of push ups before he moved to the bag, and ignored Bruce, though it must have been obvious that he was there. Barnes moves from the mats to the boxing bags, working mostly with its right hand, and only using its left when it works on combinations. Bruce watches him for a while, noticing a decay in Barnes’ abilities to use his right arm. The bag doesn’t swing as much, and the hits start twisting in a bad way, causing a chain reaction of anger and overuse of the muscles. 

“B-Bucky, stop,” Bruce says unsurely, walking up to the Asset. He’s never used that name before, it always seemed like something only the Captain was allowed to say, but he also hadn’t been given another name to use. 

“Don’t call me that,” the Asset grunts, throwing a weakened punch at the bag with his right arm then sending it flying with his left. 

“What should I call you then?” 

The Asset starts, reconsidering. No one’s ever asked that question before. 

After thinking it over, the Asset responds with, “Winter.” 

Bruce’s brow furrows a bit at the choice, but he nods. 

“Winter it is.” 


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A brief interlude between chapters.

It wasn't living. He was a tool. An object. A weapon. Not even a fist. Just a thing. No one understood that. Physical stimuli was deadened information, neurones sluggishly connecting and delivering a message that wouldn't translate into emotion anymore. Homeostatic response died with his arm. Frostbite. Hypothermia. Death. Brought back by a strike of lightening from the hands of Russian spies. There was nothing left. After the treatments at the camp and the experiments in Russia, there was simply nothing left. His only drive was following orders. Brock understood that. Gave him orders. The orders kept him alive and moving. Brock liked seeing him move. They never touched. Rumlow never touched him. Just looked. Watched. Commanded. But never touched. He understood that touching the Asset meant changing it. He refused to. He saw through the rot on his insides all the way through to where the remnants of a person still cried for comfort. Steve didn't understand. But he was the mission. The mission was to please him now. That meant touching. Being touched. Changing. Brock wouldn't recognise this thing he became. An imitation of a homunculus. A puppet attached to strings that weren't paying attention. He'd been touched and dirtied and changed. The metamorphosis was irreversible, he knew that because Brock never touched him. Now, he'd never see him again. 

The Asset malfunctioned.


	7. Chapter 7

Once Winter’s been sat down on a bench press so Bruce can look over its arm and stab wound, Bruce finds his mind narrowing down to duties as a doctor rather than what he hopes will one day be the role of friend. There’s tissue damage to the right biceps and inner forearm. The wrist is sprained and the knuckles swollen considerably. He asks Winter what hurts, what isn’t ‘functioning properly’ and the problem appears to be that the right arm isn’t as strong as the left. The Asset attempted to even the power outputs as far as Bruce can tell, but it was reckless work and done without any protection. It didn’t make sense that Winter would be so harmful when working out because there was obvious evidence that in the past there had been workout regimens that resulted in the current amount of muscle and physical prowess. 

“Why would you go so far as to nearly dislocate your wrist, Winter?” Bruce asks, peering up past the long hair obscuring Winter’s face. It’s still a name he needs to get used to, but Bruce is nothing if not someone who at least does his best to keep others comfortable. 

“It wouldn’t work. Wasn’t as strong,” the Asset answers, staring down into his hands like they’ve offended him. 

“That’s obvious, isn’t it? Your left arm is augmented beyond normal human capacity. It’s possible that your right arm will never reach the same level of strength as your left.” 

Winter’s brows pull together severely, to the point it looks painful. The muscles are held locked there, and Bruce decides firmly on what he will do before he does it. 

He flicks the Winter Soldier in the forehead. 

As he suspected, it’s enough to snap it out of the deep contemplation and shift its face into one of blank shock, looking for answers in Bruce’s face. For something it did wrong. 

Instead, Bruce only smiles at him and gently chides that ‘your face will freeze like that’ before pulling Winter up by both hands and walking back to the elevator. 

“Would you mind coming with me to my room, Winter?” Bruce asks. 

The shock melts away and what replaces it is a harrowing blank stare that chills Bruce to the very marrow of his bones. The Asset nods, but Bruce doesn’t feel that it is even close to true consent because there is such a gaping  _ nothing _ in those eyes. 

“Sit,” Bruce murmurs shakily, his brain starting to put two and two together, but the answers terrify him. 

The Asset drops into a cross legged position without pause, staying there with that empty look trained on Bruce’s scared face. 

“I think that’s a very bad idea, then, Winter,” Bruce stammers.

The Asset reals internally searching again for something it did wrong, but it can’t think of an order it disobeyed or something it failed to do. Bruce sees the slightest shift in Winter’s face but then it’s trained back into that lifeless look. 

Bruce feels the Other Guy worm up into his throat a bit, thinking what kind of conditioning Winter must have gone through to elicit such responses. He swallows slowly and reaches a hand out to help Winter up from the floor. After a moment of thought, he decides on his course of action. 

“I’d like you to do something else for me, Winter,” he says carefully, watching the eyes that were still so worryingly barren. 

There’s a minute change in the Asset, however. This would be easy, wouldn’t it? An order. Something to fulfill. Finally someone would tell it what to do and it could prove to be capable and useful and they wouldn’t need the reconditioning, or the punishment, or the cryo-chamber. Maybe they would realise the Asset was considered just that: an asset. Not a broken soldier that needed coddling, but a fully functional, multi-faceted tool that  _ could get the job done. _

“Yes?” Winter asks, hoping not to sound too excited or impatient. 

“I’d like you to write me a letter.” 

The Asset blinks. A letter. 

Bruce catches the almost flash of expression in Winter’s face, and has to tighten his jaw to hold in a childish grin. 

“In this letter I would like to ask of you three things: a happy memory, one doubt you have about your current situation, and one secret. And I would like you to eat the sandwich I brought you.” Bruce gives a kind smile and asks if any of that needs clarification. The Asset, of course, shakes its head no. 

“Alright,” Bruce says with a nod, “then I will look forward to your letter. Until then, I think I’m going to do some research in my lab. I’d like to see your response before I turn in for the night, if that wouldn’t be too much trouble?”

Winter replies nonverbally that ‘no it would not be a problem’ and bows slightly, understanding at least that this was a proffered chance to exit. 


End file.
